Sunday, January 27, 2008

My latest drawing is a tribute to Sergio Martino's satanic giallo All The Colors of The Dark, starring the painfully gorgeous Edwige Fenech! I wish I had a bit more time to work on this one but it still contains several noteworthy exploitation highlights: anguished portraits that barely resemble the cast, pseudo occult symbols, gratuitous nudity, and a snarling decapitated dog head that doesn't appear in the actual film. The original drawing is 12" x 15" but hopefully you can see some of the loving detail in this low-res scan. I drew this for the Super Trash Film Fest and the original will be on display Friday February 1st through Sunday February 3rd! Prepare yourself for 72 hours of mind-fucking celluloid, vendors, beer, dancing girls, celebrity guests, and an entire exhibit of re-imagined movie poster art! Come for the art, stay for Big Trouble In Little China!

Tuesday, January 22, 2008

There's an interview with me in the new issue of Roctober magazine! This is a dense 136-page monster of a zine that celebrates "unjustly obscure musical icons, enigmas, and eccentrics"! I hope I'm an eccentric and not an enigma. The new issue also features a tribute to Dickie Peterson of Blue Cheer!!!! Support this badass independent publication!

Thursday, January 10, 2008

The traveling Robert Crumb exhibit parks its sordid ass at Seattle's Frye Art Museum on Saturday January 26th with a special lecture by comix historian Patrick Rosenkranz at 2pm. This promises to be a very special afternoon with one of the world's leading experts on underground comix art. Get there early! Also this month, in conjunction with the Crumb exhibit, is a very special show at Fantagraphics Books & Gallery entitled Rebel Visions! This exhibit features rarely glimpsed original work by such masters of underground art as Rick Griffin, S. Clay Wilson, and Greg Irons (who incidentally worked as a tattoo artist at the infamous Seattle Tattoo Emporium prior to his untimely death in 1984). This is a rare opportunity to celebrate REAL underground art! Rebel Visions will be on display through February 6th so don't miss it!

Tuesday, January 08, 2008

Welcome back, fiends! It's been a while since I last posted so it's time to ring in 2008 with a new drawing & a new installment of Gross Anatomy! This time we'll take a look at the evolution of my recent drawing for Welsh expatriate & D.I.Y. publisher Pete Lewis' zine Foul Weather! Pete's zine explores everything from surfing to politics and he still listens to Excel when he's skating so you know he rules. Ok, lets' go...

This drawing is inspired by two things that people should really care more about: impending environmental disaster and Sacred Reich. I start out real loose just to get a feel for the composition and the motion I'm trying to convey...

From the initial sketch I start formulating exactly what I want this fucker to look like and I basically de-flesh the surfer. Why? Because re-animated skeletons are just more fun to draw than surfer dudes. This has almost nothing to do with the actual content of the zine. Anyway, you can see all the important details that will emerge later when I hit it with the ballpoints. Most of the problem solving happens during this stage...

Surf Guantanamo! I spend hours painstakingly laying on the ink to make the details of this frozen moment leap out. Note the droplets of water all around the surfer's body. Those have to be carefully planned and worked around because I can't erase at this stage (I guess I could use white-out but it just wouldn't look the same). This is a raw scan of the final image. Enjoy!

Click on the images above to get a closer look at the detail. Until next time...never surrender to the undertow!